We're a repair facility in the Southwest (I am personally a huge fan of Hackaday in my private life) .

We do a fair bit of work with EEPROM already and we have many/most test equipment on hand. We repair the equipment and 0 time the hour counter which is stored in EEprom. Unfortunately, Newer models have tighter integration and the EEPROM is found on a board which we haven't been able to work out where it actually is located, much less be able to remove it. We have found several IC's that look like the right candidates but many are write protected such that I don't have much hope simply removing the chip will yield much but I'm far from an expert on this.

We already are communicating serially via rs232 via the hardware interface with what we believe is the same chip and same data structure that is stored on this EEPROM chip. We have most of the library already figured out including all the queries to read hours and to write other parameters.

but we have not been able to figure out which sequence zero's out the hours. We've tried (simple) brute force methods of figuring out the library. we've tried lots of other methods as well but I just feel that we are out of our depth here. we have some information available and several amateur programmers but no one with this kind expertise and middleware experience. Our old EEPROM read/write software is very limited.

We'd be interested foremost in finding this hours reset ability so we can continue to do these repairs, we'd be interested secondarily in perhaps revising our EEPROM handling capability and being less dependent on hardware solutions.

We might have to fly you out etc.. to review the problem further but please message me here if you have questions. I don't handle the contracting stuff but its very important to us to get this sorted out. We might consider alternatively sending the board out if that's what it takes.

Here's a few pictures to help get a feel of the situation

(the old EEPROM board)

(The integrated controller)

(a better shot)

Additionally we've been able to read and look up a few of the IC names, the probable eeprom candidates and some extras are as follows: